Bookstore Days

David Bowie came in once to buy The Origins of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I’d read it and was cool
at the register, declining to make small talk with the rock star.
He had a girl on each arm and they were a walking ménage a trois
in my healthy which is to say my sick young mind. Nervous-looking –
druggy paranoia maybe, or worried they’d be noticed or not.

Susan Sontag browsed and bought nothing, having read everything
already, I imagined. Two young men accompanied her,
photogenic bookends clinging to her every silent word.

Fred Gwynne came on a busy Saturday night, Sunday Times
night, ink stains everywhere in a frenzy of slapping together
and doling it out for a dollar – Oh how long ago it was.
Dear Herman Munster with a redhead on each arm,
decidedly unmonstrous ladies wrapped in murderous fur
for the trio had had a night on Broadway I am sure.

*

To the age of 25 or so, bookstore clerking was my main skill. The SLC campus bookstore, New Morning Bookstore in Soho (setting for the poem above), a midtown-Manhattan Barnes & Noble, the Brazos Bookstore and the River Oaks Bookstore in Houston, and Printer's Ink in Palo Alto (the Stegner fellowship I had didn't pay enough, so I taught ESL and clerked to make ends meet).

Spring St. between West Broadway & Thompson, NYC
ca. 1979

But New Morning was the best: a literary and all-around arts nexus, crazy customers, the occasional celeb, eclectic selection, and a wonderful bunch of folks on staff: Ron Kolm, Thomas McGonigle, Michael Labambardo, Chris Gresov, Ellen Cavolina, Maggie Vitagliano, Cathy Corrigan, Jeff Adams, Opal [?], Roz [?], Walt [?] -- briefly, also, Richard Edson and Adele Bertei. And who am I forgetting?

Tuli Kupferberg and Samuel Menashe were frequent visitors, holding forth for who would listen; various writers of course: Gary Indiana, Hal Sirowitz -- and the big-deal painters of the day stopped in now and then: Robert Longo, Francesco Clemente -- but no one impressed me as much as Joni Mitchell, who I swear was all in blue. Probably there were many others, but I was too ignorant to know.

I was there 1980 -- 1983, but with a couple of jaunts out West to try to work on fishing boats (got on one for a week in Oregon while staying with Vijay Seshadri, was miserable, came back tail between legs, as I have so often in life).

So, a nostalgia piece: my weakness, at this middle-aged stage of life. The structure is donnée: each notable mentioned in the poem did indeed come in with a pair of younger companions, so the poem has a sort-of do-see-do pattern.. 

For a little more, here's an interview with Ron:

http://www.litkicks.com/RonKolm

For Balance

Two more, somewhat longer and essay-like, blog posts on the issue referred to below:

http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2011/02/rankine-at-awp-part-3-tony-hoaglands.html

http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-patronage-killed-social-activism-in.html

Change

   - after the Hoagland/Rankine thread, Feb. 2011

In the Walmart parking lot
   a man walked up to me;

he seemed distraught
  and angry, and cried:

“That white man over there
  called me a nigger!”

which, although I heard
  exactly what he said,

I decoded inside my head
  as: “That white man over there

took out a knife
  and stabbed me in the heart!”

and I blurted out
  “let’s call the police!”

whereupon the man,
  the very sad man

put his hand on my shoulder
  and asked, “are you ok?”

to which I replied, “yes;
  yes, I think I’m ok.”

Then the man asked for some money
  and I gave him everything I had,

two dollars
  and some change.

*

The Hoagland poem is here. Rankine's post relating to her AWP panel presentation to the poem is here. A couple of blog posts about the matter are here and here.

Steamer Trunk

Steamer Trunk

We had a steamer trunk that was a refrigerator
for old magazines and toys of our ancestors.

Someday I was to inherit the train and tin soldiery,
my sister the dolls. They stood in the trunk my mother cracked

to let us see our future in her past. The dolls and things
inhabited the steamer trunk like apartment dwellers

after an earthquake, but you opened the steamer trunk
like a reluctant fridge or a door that was one-third its house.

Only our mother had the key; she’d traveled once by ship
though it seemed the steamer trunk was a mode of travel

by itself: houseboat, space portal, even submarine –
conceived before they knew what one should look like.

When I wasn’t looking it was gone, the steamer trunk;
the toys and other things escaped as well. What test

did we fail to lose our inheritance? I forget whole years,
and even people and places, so of course

I might have had the toys and lost them.
But the trunk’s compartments are still here:

the must, the brown shadows, the rust of metal joints
and faded flowers of the lining: open the door,

smell the salt-sea air, wave to passing voyagers.
O fluttering, birds of eyelashes! Sleep; arrive.

*

Another of several nostalgia odes (as opposed to elegies). Things that counter the increasing virtuality of our lives.

Continuing as well, my effort to discover the fugue within each poem: three or four sounds that repeat, lull, anchor the poem --

There was a steamer trunk, somewhere: but perhaps not belonging to my mother. I remember the temptation to enter it; I remember its walls and rooms, and the attic light. But beyond that, this is made up. Or it is everyone's middle-class, early-twentieth-century childhood.

Stealing Gas

Night, cars parked under the pines,
we’re sprinting the lanes with no sidewalks
along the swooshed curbs into the cul de sacs
with Big Wheels and barbeques in the yards,
looking for a left-out hose to sever a length
and siphon gas for our thirsty Chevelle.
Then by the grace of not getting caught
and the death-like sleep of the mothers and fathers,
we’ll drive onward aimlessly-ardently
past all the cul de sacs with all the girls
whose windows we throw stones at to wake
and tell come out come out we’re horny
and lonely and did we mention horny?
This teenage fuel puts us on our own small moon
but there’s always room for you, and you, and you.

*

Another one-sentence poem; varying between three and four beats per line. Still rather sadly revisiting the days of my youth, but I assume lads still do this sort of thing. This was about as rowdy as I ever got; and I was essentially a passenger. Still, essentially, a passenger...?